We who came here saw what was happening. This was far more than a war in a faraway place. This was a moral imperative, a terrible vision of the future.

What my future will not be is active politics in the Liberal Democrat party.

I am here because I think it was a terrible sin of the west to allow those years of war.

We who came here saw what was happening. This was far more than a war in a faraway place. This was a moral imperative, a terrible vision of the future.

We have invented a new human right here - the right to return home after a war.

It was a superb agreement to end a war, but a very bad agreement to make a state. From now on, we have to part company with Dayton and try to build a modern democratic state, for which I have tried to lay the foundations.

We have to make their livelihoods viable, get them the proper prices for their produce, try and make them stay rather than sell their property and leave again.

It's not my job to be popular. I'm goal-driven; my job is to get results.

Maybe it's legitimate criticism, though it can be hurtful. Maybe I haven't paid sufficient attention to the people with whom I would have a natural affinity as a liberal, and they feel let down by that.

The generous way of putting it is that we were not ready for this. The less generous way is to say: How was it possible to return to the politics of appeasement of the 1930s?

Politics is compromise.

It would be a foolish high representative who worked that way.

I love this country, I love these people, though I can't say I love their politicians. People are always nicer than politicians, but here, you can mark that difference up a hundredfold.

People do not want politicians they know to be corrupt.

I was told there would be riots in the streets, but there were no riots.

My second job has been to try to use my power to create institutions of a modern state that could enter the European Union, and there was very little time. The door was closing, and I wanted to get Bosnia through before it shut.

I've had much nastier things said about me in the British press than in the Bosnian press.

Bosnia is under my skin. It's the place you cannot leave behind. I was obsessed by the nightmare of it all; there was this sense of guilt, and an anger that has become something much deeper over these last years.

I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No.

Politics is about putting yourself in a state of grace.

It works both ways: there are victims of tragedy who come to me who have experienced grief of such magnitude that they cannot reconcile. Likewise, I cannot change the mentality of those who committed the crimes or the fools who followed them.

The greatest failure is that although we have created institutions, we have not created a civil society.

I don't think Bosnia is ready for reconciliation, but I do think it is ready for truth.

I am formally accountable to the steering board of the PIC, and I meet with nine ambassadors from the PIC every week. I have to have the capitals' broad agreement with what I do.

I can create institutions, but I can't rewrite the chips in people's heads.

We have invented a new human right here the right to return home after a war.

The future belongs to those who see possibilities before they become obvious.

It looks like the future's really bright.

I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

Some of the best lessons we ever learn are learned from past mistakes. The error of the past is the wisdom and success of the future.

Race horses are like golfers, you're never sure how they're going to come out of the stalls. It's just - hopefully the horses come out of the race all right, just fit and ready to go again in the near future, but 3rd was good. It's paid for its hay.

Philosophy finds it an easy matter to vanquish past and future evils, but the present are commonly too hard for it.

In 1975 I decided that there was no future in flying (airline jobs were impossible to get, and who wants a job where you are judged only by seniority?) and headed off to grad school.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.

And while the U.S. can never be 100 percent safe from a future strike, our government is working around the clock on measures to protect the American people.

No one is more important to the future of our state than our teachers.

We believe that peace is not just signed papers, but rather a contract between generations for the building of a more promising and less threatening future.

What I'm suggesting to you is that this could be a renaissance. We may be on the cusp of a future which could provide a tremendous leap forward for humanity.

Yet, our achievements also mask many continuing failings and seem to expose more future dangers.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

Infuse your life with action. Don't wait for it to happen. Make it happen. Make your own future. Make your own hope. Make your own love. And whatever your beliefs, honor your creator, not by passively waiting for grace to come down from upon high, but by doing what you can to make grace happen... yourself, right now, right down here on Earth.

It also allows you to look as though you're not particularly from the present, future or past, either.

Life is an operation which is done in a forward direction. One lives toward the future, because to live consists inexorably in doing, in each individual life making itself.

The transfer is a monumental occasion as the Iraqi people take control of their government and their future and forge ahead with creating a society governed by the tenets of life, liberty and freedom.

The future and eternity are two entirely different things.

Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go.

To live for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.